The AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review: Twelve Threads vs Four at $250
by Ian Cutress on April 11, 2017 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
Corona 1.3
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
POV-Ray 3.7.1
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
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Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
I think exact the same thing: R5 1600 + RX580 is going to be unbeatable value for money.deltaFx2 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
@Ian Cutress: It would be helpful to know whether any of the workloads above use AVX-256, just to know how prevalent they are in common code. For example, does your 3DPM code use AVX-256? Also, when you run legacy tests, are the binaries legacy too, or do you recompile when applicable?beerandcandy - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
This looks like it might be a good start for AMD to get back in the game. This isn't the normal way you try to do these things. I think mostly you want to show your best CPU "DESTROY" the competitors best CPU. If AMD doesn't do that then it sucks because they wont be able to compete in the halo CPU product areas. This will also cause them to be in a limited market space and they will be forced into less profitable situationspandemonium - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
I am curious why comparable Intel 2011-3 CPUs weren't included? The i7-6800k would be in nearly direct competition to the 1800X based on cores and MSRP.ET - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Thanks for the comprehensive testing. I was missing some Core i7 results for comparison in some tests, such as the compilation test.Lechelou - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Leonard Nimoy voiced Civ IV, not V. Just sayin'.madwolfchin - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Someone at AMD should rethink about the position of R7 1700 vs R5 1600X, The 1600X is faster in Single Tread, and about even with the 1700 in multi-threaded application. Why would anyone buy the 1700 which is much more expensiveOutlander_04 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Because you can OC it and have the same performance as an 1800XMeteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
I've only read as far as the test-bed set-up page: I want to say a MASSIVE thank you to MSI for supplying the GTX1080s. Top stuff, and that won't be forgotten.Back to reading...
vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Wow so Anandtech have now turned into AMD shills. Not only you conveniently excluded or ignored the 7700k, but also skipped the 7600k from the gaming benchmarks to paint Ryzen in a better light than reality actually reflects.I understand you had to finish the article ASAP but Anandtech was all about quality articles and you really should've published the article when you had all the facts.